Last year, Valve teased gamers around the world with the promise of eventually releasing a level editor for Portal 2. The company’s been frustratingly close-lipped about details since then — until yesterday, that is. Valve announced that the level editor is shipping as a DLC offering called the Perpetual Testing Initiative, coming to PC and Macs on May 8th for the low, low price of absolutely free.

Aside from that information, the Valve press release was pretty lightweight:

The “Perpetual Testing Initiative” allows players to easily create, share, and play Portal 2 puzzles. The Initiative comes with a simplified puzzle maker that allows that creation of mind-bending puzzles without ever leaving the game.

The puzzle maker can directly publish maps to the Steam Workshop where users can browse, vote on, and select to play them. Selected puzzles will automatically be downloaded and installed inside Portal 2.

So, yeah, that’s about that. Be sure to watch the awesomely humorous video above to get a better feel for the Perpetual Testing Initiative. Will a level editor coax you into blowing the cobwebs off of Portal 2 and taking it for a whirl again?

Most notebooks that are capable of pulling off a true frag fest on the run are portable in name only, being heavy-duty 15- to 17-inch monsters with battery lives briefer than butterfly’s lives. To make mobile matters worse, Alienware recently announced that its M11x is being put out to pasture. Fear not, traveling gamers: all is not lost. Maingear is, well, gearing up a new 11-inch gaming notebook of its own, the Pulse.

Don’t worry; even though it sports the same name as an older (and ill-fated) tower/box PC produced by Maingear, this Pulse is a totally different beast. Engadget reports it’ll pack in an Ivy Bridge CPU, an Nvidia GT650M with 2GB of RAM, an 11.6-inch 1366×768 display, THX TruStudio Pro audio and up to 16GB of dual-channel RAM. The base model rocks 8GB of RAM, a 320GB hard disk drive and a Core i5 for $1,099. Of course, this is Maingear we’re talking about, so expect a flood of customization options to be available.

Few things in life are as frustrating as losing a Starcraft match to a Zerg Rush. Falling to a teeming wave of cheap, quickly produced Zerglings flat-out sucks. No matter how many cannons you fire, the fodder just keeps coming. A new Google easter egg brings the doomed gameplay of fending off an unending Zerg Rush to your Google Search results — but unlike in Starcraft, it’s actually surprisingly fun. (You’re still screwed in the end, though.)

Just search for “Zerg rush” — minus the quotation marks — to get the party started. Legions of little red and yellow “O”s swarm in from the edges of the screen, determined to demolish your search results. (Amusingly, most of those search results talk about the Zerg Rush easter egg. How meta!) Each search result has a life bar, as does each “O”; left-clicking on an “O” two or three times brings it down.

It doesn’t matter if you click until your finger goes numb; the Zerg “O”s just keep on coming. (Protip: they attack the sections of the screen you can’t see, too, so be sure to scroll up and down occasionally.) Eventually, your last search result will crumble beneath the onslaught, and the “O”s will swirl together to form “GG” — Starcraft slang for good game. Then you can share your score on Google+ afterwards.

Throughout the years, AMD’s strategy against Intel has been to undercut the Santa Clara chip maker in price, though that’s not necessarily by design. Clock for clock, AMD’s processors don’t usually pack the same performance punch as Intel’s silicon, and that’s especially true with the launch of Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture. In response to Ivy Bridge, AMD decided another round of price cuts was in order.

Not all of those represent price cuts. The FX-4100 and FX-4170 are both unchanged, for example, while the FX-6100 and FX-6200 dropped by $10 each. AMD’s eight-core processors saw bigger reductions; the FX-8120 dropped by $20 and the FX-8150 by $40.

Google Drive is the new online storage locker everyone is talking about, but lest anyone forget about Dropbox, there’s a new version available that ups the stakes with the ability to automatically upload photos and videos from just about any digital camera, tablet pc, smartphone, or SD card. There’s also a new Photos pages on Dropbox’s website where you can view all of your uploaded snapshots.

“Getting pictures off your camera has always been a huge pain. So we put our heads down and worked worked worked to ensure that automatic upload would play nicely with anything that might have a photo or video on it,” Dropbox explains in a blog post. “With the newest version for Mac or Windows, you can just plug your camera, phone, or SD card into your computer and with a few clicks of the mouse all your photos and videos are in your Dropbox!”

Photos and videos tend to take up more space than Word documents, so to sweeten the deal, Dropbox will give you 500MB of additional free storage space for your first automatic upload and will keep stretching the online container 500MB at a time, up to 3GB extra, pro bono.

Sign Up for Reviews via Email!

This content can easily be edited in the footer.php file of the theme. If you activate widgets in the footer, this content will all be replaced with your widgets. Or, you can simple disable the entire section in the theme options.

Special Offer 1

This is a content area in the footer where you can promote special offers or activate widgets for recent posts, image galleries and more! Read more!

Special Offer 2

This is a content area in the footer where you can promote special offers or activate widgets for recent posts, image galleries and more! Read more!